Today's letters: The right cannot unite – and more arguments about drugs

In this Wednesday, May 11, 2011, file photo, a man prepares heroin he bought on the street to be injected at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Citizen readers have been debating about drugs. Darryl Dyck, APDarryl Dyck / AP

The right will never uniteRe: Memories may be beautiful, and yet…, Aug. 22

Thoughtful column, although I don’t think we can go back to “the way we were.” Conservatives in their “unite the right” desperation will never again speak with one voice.

What is a conservative Conservative is as fraught with disunity as what is a liberal Liberal, or what is left or right. You can call it “identity politics” on the left, but that places a negative value to what I have always believed in, that there is a role for government to ensure that minorities are treated with the same standards and privileges as the majority.

Protest groups like Idle No More and Black Lives Matter are there not as separate self-serving organizations but as speakers for those people displaced by winner-takes-all, majority rule.

And it’s through human-rights provisions that we are able to live together as a better society. Conservatives paint liberals as “social justice warriors,” but in my mind that’s a compliment, so thank you.

Peter Haley, Ottawa

Monuments help us learn from past

Removing statues or monuments, and to try and re-write (or even re-right) history should be carefully thought out, otherwise there will be no historical record left.

The monuments aren’t glorifying historical mistakes; they’re merely providing a visual reminder, a record, of the many atrocities of the past.

Monuments are history’s reminders of what should not be done, not necessarily how-to roadmaps. We cannot change history, but we can learn from it so as to change the future. Monuments are our visual mistakes, not necessarily our victories.

Douglas Cornish, Ottawa

Punishing drug use isn’t the best strategyRe: Decriminalizing drugs no fix for opioid crisis, Aug. 18

I read with disbelief Mohammed Adam’s article and am struggling to understand the mindset that dismisses evidence as “cherry-picked.” I suspect it’s based in the belief that punishment works. Yet, evidence has been collected over the decades to show that at a basic behavioural level, punishment is an ineffective long-term strategy.

We have proceeded with a war on drugs because there’s a belief that we can scare people sober. What the evidence shows is that it makes no more sense to punish an addict than it does to punish a person with a heart condition so they will not have heart attacks.

It would be a far, far wiser use of scarce resources to take what we currently spend enforcing, punishing and trying to stem the problem and instead apply them to identification, education, treatment and support. We must take a critical view of the system and address the best points of intervention – such as the pharmaceutical and medical over-prescribing of these drugs. Simplistic answers will not work.

The war on drugs has been waged for 50 years or more and it’s being lost. Let’s look at something new that has been shown to work in several jurisdictions.

A recent letter drawing a direct comparison between recreational drug addicts and insulin-dependent diabetics is demeaning to the latter. I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for 57 years now and the only reason that I’m still alive is because of four daily insulin injections.

The writer probably thinks of Type 2 diabetics (about 90 per cent of diabetics) who are seldom prescribed insulin and who are generally overweight and under-exercised. Those people can certainly change their lifestyle and improve their situation dramatically. But not Type 1s. Exercise and a proper diet, careful record-keeping and all of the rest of the tight discipline required of Type 1 diabetics can certainly improve their lives and stave off complications, but they can never obviate the need for insulin.

The comparison with drug addicts is odious. Drug addicts deprived of their chemical of choice are much less likely to die, even if they would like to at the time of withdrawal. Many do kick their habits and live “normal” lives. Diabetes is not a habit but a genetic affliction. There is a significant difference.

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